Microsoft now lets you use powerful Copilot Pro AI tools... for a fee

It isn't that long since Microsoft launched its new swathe of Copilot AI tools for businesses to enable in their Office programs, and it's already making them available directly to consumers. 

A new subscription, priced at £19 or $20 a month and called Copilot Pro, will let you unlock Copilot across all of Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote and PowerPoint (although the Excel version remains a preview). 

That's not all - the subscription will also get you early access to new models from OpenAI, the ability to generate images and, down the line, access to a suite of tools that can let you build your own "Copilot GPT" using a tool that will arrive soon. 

That might be pretty enticing to those who are particularly keen on experimenting with AI, but the tools that are likely to get the most use in the here and now are those additions to how Office programs work. 

Introducing Copilot Pro: Supercharge your Creativity and Productivity - YouTube

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For example, you could give Copilot a text-based prompt while making a slideshow in PowerPoint and it'll generate a slide for you completely on its own. 

Or, in Excel, you might prefer to tell it that you want a cell to summarise the average contents of a bunch of other cells - again, it'll make that for you, without you needing to get into the detail of all the equations that might otherwise be needed. 

Those tools could become second nature pretty quickly, so you might well find value in them, although there's no denying that £19 is a somewhat steep monthly cost.

Still, there will be plenty of people who see bundled access to new OpenAI models as being a big bonus - right now it means instant access to GPT-4 Turbo, the newest version available, and it comes without any restrictions on peak times. 

That's quite a big leg-up on normal users who might face wait times and slower timelines when generating from prompts. 

There are a whole heap of FAQs and extra details on Microsoft's website dedicated to Copilot Pro, so if you're curious to learn more about the subscription (or to sign up for it), be sure to check that out.